In the tradition of Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Offenbach’s score, based on a story by Musset, had partly disappeared in the fire at the Opéra Comique. With a staging by Thomas Jolly, the show rises from its ashes and promises to be an event.
The student Fantasio dreams of changing his life. The king’s jester has just died: what if he took his place? But no one loved the deceased more than Princess Elsbeth, promised by her father to a political union with the Prince of Mantua. The young jester will lead the princess to listen to her heart. How far will she let herself be seduced?
Offenbach owed Musset one of his first successes, La Chanson de Fortunio. A Fantasio reworked by the poet’s brother was enough to make him dream, with its romantic colors. But the 1872 premiere followed the defeat of Sedan: the public rejected Offenbach’s claim to do anything other than operetta. The score of Fantasio was recycled in Les Contes d’Hoffmann, and then disappeared in part in the fire at the Opéra Comique. 
Reconstructed in 2013, it is now entrusted to Laurent Campellone and Thomas Jolly, whose dramaturgical work was made public from its beginnings in 2015, with the “Chronicles of Fantasio”. 
The Opéra Comique creates Fantasio at the Théâtre du Châtelet, which will then close for renovations. Like scaffolding, the collaborative spirit keeps institutions young… Didn’t the Opéra Comique already stay eleven years on this same place du Châtelet, at the end of the 19th century, for construction reasons? The story continues!